If you believe what you may have read online in the past 24 hours, in about five to 10 years we'll all be donning high-tech goggles when we go online, interacting with people who may be on the other side of the planet in virtual shops, classrooms and city streets. This sci-fi future will have been brought to you by Facebook, thanks to its inspired and forward-looking acquisition of Oculus VR back in 2014.

That appears to be the dream of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who spoke about creating new kinds of social experiences, enabled by Oculus' immersive technology. He even name-checked his competition on a conference call about the $2 billion deal, saying that Sony and Microsoft's current offerings in immersive technology will never be as far-reaching as Facebook's because they're strictly console plays.

"[On mobile,] what we see is that about 40% of the time that people spend overall is in gaming," Zuckerberg said. "And about 40% is also spent in social communications. About half of that is in Facebook. What we basically believe is that unlike the Microsoft or Sony pure-console strategies, if you want to make this a real computing platform, you need to fuse both of those things together."

Considering Kinect (which isn't the same as Oculus, but is clearly Microsoft's first foray into immersive experiences) sold 24 million units before it got bundled with the Xbox, it's a little disingenuous to dismiss it as small potatoes, compared to a product that hasn't even shipped a consumer version yet.

And from the start, it was clear Microsoft had bigger ambitions than just gaming. It's even beginning to see them through with Kinect for Windows and the budding IllumiRoom concept, which is more holodeck than virtual reality.

"I don't think [Zuckerberg] did anyone any favors by propagating the hype," said Brian Blau, a research director at Gartner. "It's the same mantra VR has had for 25 years. I believe the immersive experiences are compelling, but i think it's going to be years before the tech and apps catch up to people's expectations."

Zuckerberg's half-right about Sony, though. The company's recently unveiled Project Morpheus headset is pretty much just a gaming play — but it's a good gaming play. Those who got the demo (like my colleague Chelsea Stark) came away impressed, and its future looks promising. If there's been any success story at Sony in the past 20 years, it's PlayStation.

Yes, Oculus had a lot of good buzz well before Facebook came calling. Everyone who tries it, raves about it, and it's no coincidence that the headset was one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns ever.

But the response to the Oculus Rift has more to do with what it promises than what it actually delivers. An enveloping virtual environment has clear appeal as a concept, and it's certainly fueled plenty of compelling science-fiction scenarios over the past 30 years. But when you start to break the idea down to specific virtual experiences, it quickly runs into the all-too-real problems of hardware limitations, software availability and even user disorientation.

More to the point: There isn't a killer app for VR yet, and I'm pretty sure Facebook wasn't at the top of any VR developer's to-do list.

"We're really at the point where it's up to application developers to start building content for this platform," said Eric Mizufuka, product manager for new markets at Epson, which makes augmented-reality headsets. "Identifying killer apps is the next hurdle. For VR, it'll be games."

On that score, Sony may have an advantage over Oculus. While the Oculus Rift will probably attract more developers than Morpheus due to its open-source nature, that could end up diluting the experience as lousy apps get on the same virtual shelves as good ones. That's almost guaranteed not to happen with Morpheus.

"PlayStation isn't open," Blau said. "They make sure the games are quality. They're not going to attract the large amounts of developers that Oculus will, but those apps are going to be better."

Ultimately, though, no one (apart from maybe the military) has yet created a compelling virtual-reality experience with mass appeal. Plenty have tried; all have failed. The backing of a company like Facebook can certainly help, but it doesn't magically solve technical problems or instantly create a thriving platform. Microsoft and Sony, with their long gaming and graphical experience, may be better suited to solve them, anyway — at least for the initial wave of VR, which even Zuckerberg admitted would be focused on gaming.

"There's certainly been a lot of talk about [virtual reality], a lot of hope for the tech and what it can do," Blau said. "The harder leap is to build something that meets the expectation that people make in their mind. Nobody today has built a lot of good VR experiences. It's a level playing field right now."

May the best avatar win.

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